The sublime East

Rembrandt uses oriental settings and oriental dress as a sign of our blindness to divine grace. The Orient is, to him, more a moral than a geographic location: it is the site of Man rejecting God. And since we all reject God, we are all orientals. But there were sunnier souls who, equally aware of the biblical message that divine grace manifested itself first in the Orient, focused not on the oriental rejection of Christ but on the oriental ability to receive divine grace in the first place. They saw reflections of that ability in oriental literature, whose major example was, in their minds, the Bible. This attitude was evident in Rembrandt's lifetime, more than anywhere in England, among orientalist scholars such as the Oxford Arabist and Hebraist, Edward Pocock (1604–1691). Pocock examined what was known of overall oriental literature and history in order to make conclusions about the biblical text. ¹ He thus sowed the seeds of what was to become the “new biblical criticism.” This immensely influential movement is now known mainly for its heyday in nineteenth-century Germany. That, however, did not come until after a number of brilliant biblical orientalists had followed in Pocock's footsteps in England. One of these, to whom modern biblical scholarship is particularly indebted, is the main character of this chapter.